Area of course:

Image Project

For this project, I chose to create my own interpretation of the word ‘lost’ through image and wanted the end piece to tell some sort of a story. I started by gathering a range of different ideas for my final piece – my main thoughts when I thought of the word ‘lost’ was emotion, particularly sadness and loneliness. I decided to focus on this. I chose to look at the eye in particular as I feel that the eye can tell a lot about a persons’ feelings this way and you often hear the phrase, “I could see it in their eyes.” Eyes are extremely good at portraying emotion. I captured a photograph of my own eye using macro settings that I felt portrayed deep emotion and decided to use this.

Other images that I developed included a simple drawing of a slouched figure, looking lost and depressed; a skull to suggest loss through death; and even a child to suggest loss of a child, or anyone at all for that matter. In my tutorials both with Ray and then Suzanne, it was suggested to me that I think about loss of direction, as a contrast to emotional loss, but still consistent to the original word, ‘lost’. After taking on these suggestions, I developed my piece by adding a busy-looking street map which I layered over the eye using Adobe Photoshop and an overlay tool. I also added the figure illustration and skull to my new piece.

After adding these elements, although I loved the effect of the street map layered over the eye, I felt as if the piece was now much too over-crowded and that not all of the elements were needed.

Below is my final piece that I submitted on Friday for the deadline. I remade all of the illustrations in Illustrator, rather than in Photoshop to avoid any pixelation and also completely got rid of the skull and instead used the outline of a fetus baby in the pupil of the eye. This alongside the faded silhouette of a human figure, suggests that the story behind the image is that it is a mother who has lost her child, or because the silhouette is not clear who it is, it could be just anyone who has lost someone close to them. Both illustrations also have their opacity reduced to around 20-40%, making the viewer have to look closer to spot them, drawing them in. Overall, I really enjoyed creating this final piece and was delighted with my all positive feedback.

Personally, I feel that when my piece was printed and put up on display, the printed version did not to the on-screen version justice because the colours are so much more vibrant when looking at the piece on a computer screen. I feel that there are still a few minor changes that I could do to improve the piece – I think that the outline around the silhouetted figure is probably not needed as it clear enough without it. Also, after printing the baby in the eye did not show up clearly at all and one had to look extremely hard just to be able to see it faintly – I believe it could do with being made just a little bit clearer – I want it to be faint so that you have to look close, but not this faint.